it feels like locking
the door on your loyal dog
who loved unconditionally
and saved you from your
sorrowful depths,
but you must go and
all things must end, though,
can’t you hear the whining
through the cracks?
can’t you hear the groan
through the cracks in the spine
made from opening what must
always
be shut?

Why do I dare to sing
this melody, overused and
claimed by millions of
others, with voices nearly
interchangeable but barely off,
imperceptibly so, just a dash
too much of cinnamon, not that
you’d ever know, but still
I steal these hand-me-down
words, chasing the horizon only
to retreat back to the
well-worn reef?

I want to erase the fingerprints
I leave on your days, weeks, and years,
To drain through the gaps
In your floorboards,
To float through life,
Unable to embrace but
Too incorporeal to be slapped.

I need to

go.

I long to see me
As you do,
Entirely foreign and
Mundanely beautiful.
I wish to trace
The curves of my lettering,
Attempting to decode
A message I have already
Memorized.
I have already unraveled
All of my mysteries but you
Still startle at each creak
Of the floor, each squeak
Of the door.
Nevertheless,
That elsewise wonder
Is only reserved for
Strangers.

I sit beneath the willow tree
That wilted, weeping, widow’s tree
That messy, mournful, martyr’s tree
Wishing for a better me.

I am the boughs, so bent and beaten
Desperate, derailed, defeated
Without respite, the worst repeated:
“Failed again, you failed again.”

Once, I was the vibrant green,
A softly serendipitous scene
With smiles now so seldom seen
That one day, might be found again.

I lay within the willow’s shade,
To wait and watch and let her sway,
She holds me in her vined embrace,
And says my goodness still remains.

I wish that my birthday didn’t
take a whole day because I
have too many things to do.
I do it to myself but there is just
too much and I feel spread so thin
like the frosting on a birthday cake.
I don’t have the time to celebrate and
what am I doing it for?
I’m not the one who brought me into
this world and now, here I am
squandering it.
I don’t know what I’m doing and
I’m wasting my time and I have
bitten off more than I can chew
and everyone expects greatness
from me.
I constantly fall apart so why does
my birthday deserve to take up
a whole day?

Nothing made me angrier than when
You expected the best from me and I
Felt like it was unfair, and I couldn’t do
What everyone else could, that I didn’t
Have the tools, that this was a race but
I was positioned behind the
Starting line.

I thought you didn’t understand.

And you didn’t.

But you pushed me farther than I thought
I could go, you told me that I could do it—
That I had to.
You held me to that same gold standard,
On the bad days and the good days and
The days in between, you never wavered
And you never gave me the option to
Quit.

So I ran that race, and I ran it fast
I sprinted and leaped and speeded past
Everyone else, despite where I started,
And all I could feel was the rush in the air,
The breath in my veins and the wind in my hair,
The power of my stride, the power of my will,
The strength of my wholeness, this strength I could feel,
And every time, I thought I could not do it.

You did not know my pain—
Yet you pushed me right through it.